Isamu Noguchi: A New Nature exhibition, White Cube Bermondsey

White Cube, Bermondsey’s latest exhibition – opening in February – seeks to explore the works of Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi. Noguchi was a sculptor and designer concerned with nature in all its forms and our relationship to it. ‘The nature of trees and grass is one thing,’ he told a group of students in 1970, ‘but there are many degrees of nature. Concrete can be nature. Interstellar spaces are also nature. There is human nature.’

Titled ‘A New Nature’, this show brings together works that create organic environments from manmade materials. It will include Noguchi’s light sculptures and 26 of his steel works. The centrepiece will be Ceiling and Waterfall from the lobby of 666 Fifth Avenue in New York (1957), an undulating aluminium ceiling and stainless steel fountain wall.

Noguchi believed that sculpture had a responsibility to shape the environment it inhabits. He designed several playgrounds to this end, although few were ever used as such. His work also entered the American home and his designs for lamps and coffee tables were very popular in the 1970s. Noguchi once said, ‘In a way sculpture only exists to give meaning to the space.’ He certainly lived by that belief. This exhibition will dovetail beautifully with the Barbican’s retrospective of the artist's work, which ended this month.